Books
This book was a schemata tsunami for me. As I read thru FOLKS, I also looked to my bookshelf to parallel read Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath...Cynthia Bryant writes telling truth with musical cadence. A memorable poem for me in this collection is "Voice of a Still-Small Boy, a voice Phil Levine had in his "Cry for Nothing."
Hugs...Gordon B. Preston
When Words Die, Poets are no more…
As the world shrinks
our capacity to hold words and ideas
diminishes
like a six-lane freeway
blasted down
to a solitary dirt road
In community after village
whispers fan out
Single syllable words
have the power
to turn childhood to stone,
blanch the enamel
off red ruby nails,
drive grown men mad!
In this, the Land of the free
where leaders label man-made enemies
“haters of freedom”
Our freedoms are whittled down
packaged to sell
fed to us in rote
fed to us in rote
fed to us in rote
God-fearing Americans
march along
straight and stilted paths
where no space is found
for two opposing views
to walk together
The righteous warm their hands
around the hellfire of burning books
Imagination of childhood
extinguished by terrorists
under hoods of Christ
Somewhere he shakes his head
Somewhere he shakes his head
Somewhere he shakes his head
and weeps
FOLKS
by
Cynthia L Bryant
Addend
Few people notice
A lone woman as she makes
Her way along wetted asphalt
Walks with head down
Where puddles glisten
Interpreting the many shades of gray
The shame pushed out over every inch
Serves to cloak her sensitive skin
From others prying
Her eyes catch the reflection
the knife stabs deep
sorry, out of print
sorry, out of print
Dark Mother
So many
You said I said
You thrust I parry
over the years
did not brace me
against the cutting response
to happy news
A new baby on its way
Get an abortion--
Your words
splay my skin
take up residence
then bounce off the inside walls
like a puppy
popped into the microwave
Push Start
Jealously is a mother
who could bear no fruit
resents a daughter
who fell into pregnancy
as easily as you
wiped up
the microwave
Bad Blood
Daddy told me
bad blood soaked the cloth
when I unwanted progeny
hung upside-down between
this world and oblivion
Surmised how
my birth mother's blood
flowed first on the backseat
of some car
making me a cheap commodity
on the adoption Black Market
Never let me forget
that the same bad blood
swam beneath
my thin skin
like a Great White
waiting to surface
hungry to feed